The End of the Orble Network?

The importance of this news will vary amongst you. Some of you will be like "Orble who?", whereas others will be like "What the fuck is Orble?" Orble is a blogging network that started around five to six years ago in Sydney, Australia. After gathering together a small pool of paid writers (myself amongst them) the network began growing exponentially until it contained literally thousands of blogs from around the world.

Anyway, it was realised quite early on that paying up front for writers wasn't going to be lucrative for the Orble moneymakers, so they stopped offering to pay new writers quite early on. In exchange for helping Orble make money, writers were told to sign up to Google Adsense. This was a bit of a confusing system, as it didn't always generate money. For a while I was getting paid $10 per month for the ad revenue generated on my blogs but then it just stopped without any further notice. I tried to contact the Orble people about the absence of this money but getting them to reply to such requests is like trying to get Tony Abbott to wear a pair of pants at the beach.

Long story short: Google are now apparently banning Orble-related adsense accounts. It doesn't help that activity on the Orble network has dropped off quite a lot, apparently Google are saying that they can't benefit from such blogs so adsense applications are being both rejected and deleted. This information is sourced from several current Orble bloggers.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand I'm quite happy to see Orble collapse into a heap of spam, the network grew to be mildly parasitic in the way that it operated on a points-based system. But on a similar but slightly different hand, the quality of the place was patchy at best - at least a good 50% of the writers on there were plagiarising the absolute shit out of other websites in an attempt to generate hits for their blogs, and there was zero quality control.